


That We Once Lived

by nipnap



Category: Final Fantasy XIV
Genre: Original Character(s), Other
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2019-08-06
Updated: 2019-08-06
Packaged: 2020-08-10 06:48:34
Rating: Not Rated
Warnings: Creator Chose Not To Use Archive Warnings
Chapters: 1
Words: 8,388
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/20131093
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/nipnap/pseuds/nipnap
Summary: Graham Harper is the Warrior of Light, a hero of many names and faces.Spoilers for end of Shadowbringers MSQ





	That We Once Lived

**Author's Note:**

> Although this is a personal story about characters you won't completely know and lore I struggled to remember, I hope maybe you will still enjoy it. Again, this has massive spoilers for the Shadowbringers MSQ and most likely won't make sense unless you've finished it.

Memories begin to boil to the surface of his consciousness after the final battle in the First, dreams he surely had before but had forgotten upon waking. Lives he could no longer properly remember, the faces of strangers and companions he’d lost eons ago, of bodies and minds that were never his. Graham turns to writing to get them out, finding them trapped inside him suddenly, and there are many nights after he spends in tears, assaulted by sudden bursts of buried emotions he can’t fully accept are his to experience. 

They are lives that were only his in fragmented spirit, not in reality. The memories of long lost heroes whose lives he never took part in remind him of the lives he once lived, long ago in many different eras. Was it right for him to think he was those people, when their dreams and lives and aspirations no longer followed his beyond some vague belief of bettering the world? He was himself now, Graham Harper, but that far back… who was he? Sometimes woman, sometimes man, something neither or both. He was many different races, different minds, different professions, different beings altogether. 

All of it comes rushing back as incomprehensible thoughts, fractured memories that reveal unreal visions and disbelief. He can’t put it together yet, it is only raw pain and struggling fatigue. He sleeps longer, for more hours, trapped in dreams he can’t escape from. It is only when a familiar smile pierces through the madness that he suddenly awakes and begins to write frantic notes on the back of discarded music papers, possessed by some form of demon in memoria. 

A spirit visited him, back long before he was ever Graham Harper. His old self was forgotten now, a shadowy existence to the back of his skull during the first era. The apparition took upon the appearance of an Au Ra, a race he had, back then, never seen before. He remembered his voice, sunny and optimistic, piercing through some form of clouded darkness of not-yet-Graham’s mind. He remembers vaguely the disaster which nearly claimed his first life, of some great calamity unspoken, and the Au Ra spoke of his own hardships which, in his reality, ended his story without so much as a scream to cry out. Whatever story the ghost had told him, it was faded now, so he made due in his writing to instead explain the emotions. The fear that clutched at him, the resemblance to the destruction in his own realm. The same similar vein of war and strife settled in this, the first calamity. 

Amakuchi was his name, and he travelled with him as his private companion, his stories only his to hear. But their friendship, his first life, were short lived, for though he had survived the first bout of the calamity, the hardships that extended well beyond the first destruction began to claim him. The only memory of his old self was the reassuring thought he had done all that could be to keep life progressing, to ensure the path of time continued.

In his final moments he recalled Amakuchi telling him friendly stories, soothing his heart through the claws of death. At that time he died unknowing the future, of what happened to his aetheric companion. Now, after frantically scrawling the last surviving details of his memory here in the present, Graham pauses and touches a hesitant hand to his heart. He was here, with him now, that much he was sure. How much of Amakuchi actually remained was unknown. He wasn’t here anymore to speak his stories, but perhaps he was somehow responsible for the endless, restless dreams Graham struggled through. Maybe he’d seen his opening to speak again, after the battle, and spent the last of what he had to retell what little even he could remember.

Graham rewrote the scrawls again and again, filling out what little he could barely recall. By the end of it, the only memory he had was what was on the paper, not even the once vivid emotions staying in his heart so he could hold them. Even reading over his own words, he found the stories unfamiliar, and yet he had to believe they were real.

He wrote a gentle song and titled it Amakuchi. He played it along the docks of Limsa and he swore, if only for a moment, an apparition appeared amongst the crowd that gathered to listen.

\---

His mind isn’t overtaken again for a long time after, long enough to forget the pain it caused. He loses track of the days in helping with the war, in holding off the Garlean advances against the front, and in running simple tasks when the burden of heroism becomes too much. He writes only a few songs in that time, nothing he’d want to play to the public, and rereads the work of Amakuchi. It is a popular piece which other bards have taken to playing in pubs, but no one understands its meaning, the history long lost even to Graham. Perhaps even to Amakuchi, wherever he might be inside his spirit. He knows, vaguely, that others came to him after Amakuchi, during times of his own lives he doesn’t remember.

There is a lull of action in which he pulls himself from the battlefield and focuses on healing a wound he received during a poorly handled fight. He spends a lot of time indoors and takes to reading books, finding an odd interest in the calamities and their elemental associations. He secretly hopes they jog his memory, and he keeps the ballad of Amakuchi close to him to periodically review, as though jumping between the boredom of philosophical texts and his song sheets might rattle free something deep inside him.

He can’t remember anything of the second and third Umbral Era. He pretends like he can, imagining who he might have been during those eons and which apparition might have visited him, but none of it is true. Even the written documents hold very little of what happened then, and after reading through four tomes of no interest, Graham wonders if he even existed during that time. There is nothing saying he HAD to be there during those eras, and it would make sense given they took place after the Twelve disappeared. Maybe Hydalaen gave him a little break from being anything but a fragmented memory in the void… 

Oddly, much like he knew his imaginative retellings of those eras were false, he knows this is false too. He knows, in a brief flash, that he existed. But he isn’t privy to how or why or where. 

\---

He awakes screaming a week later, his body crushed beneath great bodies of molten stone. Or at least, some form of his body had been, because once he calms he finds he’s still in one piece and his innroom is not reduced to blood and ash. 

The next month is spent struggling with sleep. He finds himself staying up for days, plagued with the thought of resting, until his friends force him to bed out of worry for his health. When he closes his eyes a great war floods his memory, killing him over and over and over in the same way. Crushed beneath rock and burned alive by magma.

The world swallows him whole and does not grant him mercy.

Barrett is a Miqo’te which looks somewhat like a Viera with how long his ears are. He smiles but always seems to be in great pain, and he keeps quietly to himself, as though hoping he might not exist should he just not say a word. 

Graham gets a vague memory of himself then, some woman with ashen hair. He sees it in a veignetted thought where he is sat by a bedroom mirror, trembling not from fear but from pain. His hands don’t work well and they can’t hold a pen steady no matter how hard he tries. He can’t walk either. An attendant ushers him around, but while Graham might find this shameful, his past self does not. She writes in tomes despite the effort it demands and seems to be some sort of great tactician. 

Barrett haunts her the moment her previous descendant dies, crushed alive beneath the weight of the earth, and she lives in the hardships of the Umbral era. At first she questions him, Graham does as well in what little life he has within his own, her own, memories. 

But he is silent, traumatized, looking out towards a world unfamiliar, into the Source. The ground has become unstable and the people struggle to rebuild on it. If Graham could scream out to them, to tell them that the future will hold so many great things in it, that it isn’t the end, he would.

He is silenced by his place in time, not permitted to speak where he isn’t truly welcome.

He is haunted daily, every night, with the pained silence of Barrett’s intrusion. He wakes restless and suffering. Deep purple crescents build underneath his eyes. The Scions attempt to create some form of sleeping aid for him, which eliminate his dreams and help him sleep somewhat, but when he wakes he feels sick. It couldn’t be avoided. At some point he explains his plight to his companions and, with some begging, gets them to agree that the only path available is to move through the pain. 

He spends another month in and out of dreams, until finally Barrett speaks. He’s seated at a broken vanity, sobbing at the loss of some insurmountable amount of human life. Graham has learned, at least, that he was once a Summoner, the very cause of the destruction now befallen the realm. His other self, this woman in his memories, knows this too. 

Descendants only through Hydalaen and not blood, yet responsible in some way for the summoning of Bahamut. Responsible, as well, for the sealing of the primals powers into Dalamud. 

The thought makes Graham’s blood run cold. He thinks of Ardbert and wonders if this thought brings his spirit comfort, to know he’s not alone in being responsible for such worldly destruction. 

“We summoned creatures out of laziness. We thought to solve everything with them, that man may not have to lift a single finger. That we had found perfect harmony. We knew nothing of aether and the limits our realm had, what they ate from us, how we caused… how I caused…” Barrett’s stories ends as something seems to break inside him, and he covers his mouth in horror as the tears spill, endlessly, drowning everything including Graham.

“Oh Twelve, what have I done?!”

The pain continues, faster now, a story that seems to be missing important parts. He can feel Barrett’s suffering in every blow, watching everything he loved, from people to plant to the very earth, be drained of everything. Life eaten away by once trusted creatures. They turn to monsters, familiar sights to Graham, tethered to the summoners who beheld them. 

Ascian involvement is obvious from the start, from teaching the people how to summon to the shard’s final shudders of life. Barrett’s story ends with him desperately attempting to rebalance the aether within his home, with the final summon he had unknowingly played a role in both within his reality and within one he’d only later know of. He has no words for this memory, it is only felt as he rejoins with the source to become one being. There was one prideful moment where all things came to be balanced, not unlike a familiar feeling Graham can recognize when Bahamut was trapped within Dalamud the first time and ushered to the sky.

Then, just as suddenly as victory came, it was destroyed. Ascian tricks led way to destruction as Barrett’s final efforts to preserve his loved ones led to their deaths and the balance he had desperately attempted to restore led to one final summoning from the core of the earth.

The rock gave way and swallowed him whole, crushing everything, as great beasts rose up from the balanced aether and ate of all that remained. 

And he awoke only a ghost left tormented by the memory that he caused it all to happen.

By the time the memories stop plaguing Graham and he has written his next ballad, he has no desire to sing. The history of Barrett remains in writing, and he asks Urianger to commit it to a tome so it may be remembered, but he cannot bring himself to play it, lest its infectious depression grab hold of the people he loves. 

\---

The next dream comes gently, slowly, and puts Graham in a coma for seventy-two suns. 

It started quietly, a memory of Alphinaud teaching him how he holds his book for casting. They are in Coerthas, bundled in new coats to keep them warm, and as Graham tries to follow behind his short friend he finds him disappearing amongst the snow. The wind picks up, blinds him with empty white, and when he staggers forward. It is no longer a memory, or at least none of his own. 

Vesper, whose name he learns much later, greets him in the abyss, laying across the ever building flurry of snow with complete indifference. A more familiar Miqo’te than Barrett, but softer this time. Fluffy ears, curly purple hair, and fierce eyes. He glares at Graham, scowls at him, and they stay trapped in that timeless void of frost and empty abyss. 

When Graham tries to speak, his voice is not his own, but he can’t see himself without a mirror, so he is also a mystery. He’s certainly smaller than he usually would be, nearly swallowed up amongst the snow piles, and if it weren’t for Vesper laying flat he wouldn’t be able to make out his whole person in one gaze. 

“We should seek shelter until the storm passes!” Graham has to yell to be heard over the wind, which whips away any heat he might have had under his coat.

“The storm will not pass.” Vesper, meanwhile, need not yell at all. His voice rings through Graham’s brain in perfect clarity. “You are going to die. The world is already dead around you.”

This startles Graham in both the present and in memory, and he hesitates to respond. While it may not have been able to see past his own nose, he couldn’t believe there was nothing out there in the white beyond. 

“The frost is making you into a fool. Come on, I carry a compass on me and-” Graham reaches out, a tiny ornate hand - a caster’s hand, he realizes later. It touches Vesper’s porcelain skin and a bright light rises between them. Now it is the Miqo’te’s turn to be shocked, lifting his palm to the front of his face in confusion. Graham knew at the start of the dream what his old-self and Vesper realized only in that moment. 

The man laying atop the snow was dead. A spirit adrift. 

The realization cracks whatever anger Vesper had put to his surface and tears run and freeze to his cheeks. “But… I... “ 

Yells and calls scream out in the abyss, from deep within the storm and the world transforms from white to black.

Graham awakens to an unfamiliar room and, for a single pleasant moment, thinks he is in his own time. He was very familiar with the unfamiliar, so it made sense to him that he wouldn’t recognize where he was, in a way only a travelling hero would accept. 

But as he rises from the bed, he finds the room incredibly small. He has to shuffle across the sheets to light a candle that, if he were himself, would have been a simple reach behind him. He is a Lalafell, so he is not himself, even though he is still technically him. 

Vesper is seated at the opposite side of the room, whatever sadness he’d had previously completely covered back with anger and disdain. The room is freezing and wind howls outside the shuttered windows. 

The ghost doesn’t hesitate to tell his story. Maybe he knows, somehow, that if he shares it he can peacefully pass and no longer be forced to exist with a shattered version of himself. A version which is still alive while he has been forced to suffer. His tale is familiar, one of strife and struggles, but the details make no sense to Graham. It is like listening to Urianger explain a subject well beyond his expertise, and he can feel the same frustration with his past self. He’s forced to listen, to not understand, to feel frustrated that Vesper does not respond or reciprocate. Vesper seems to thrive on this, on having the upperhand, and the story continues unrelenting like the ice storm which traps them inside. Attendants come to care for Graham, for whoever Graham is, but they can hear nothing. Vesper continues. 

The illness that spreads. The aether that eats away at the flesh. The loss of life taken away and the great cold that replaces it. The unfair turn of events which left Vesper alone, without friends or companions to support him, forced to uncover everything on his own and take the weight of protecting all life on his shoulders. But not even the Warrior of Light could shoulder everything as just a fractured self. While he studied and searched and trained to try and save what little left of his world, the flame was snuffed out from under him. By the time he wandered out from his scholarly halls, there was nothing left to save. 

And so he wandered through the empty, icy plains, aimless and without thought. He described the feeling of hoping at any moment that someone would appear from the billowing snow. The feeling of hope dying.

With everything taken from him, Vesper could only think to lay down and wait to die. And who would fate be if she wasn’t cruel? For finally, in his waiting embrace for the void, a face appeared to him.

“And it was you.” He spat, trying to hide his sorrow. But tears were an obvious give away. “Some new warrior of light. And this… was no longer my home. No longer my life. Where am I? What am I doing here? Why am I left to wallow as some spirit, to remind me of my failures?”

Graham wants to speak, wants to say something, not unlike his time with Barrett. He wishes whoever he was knew what to say, that they would at least reach out and keep this man’s hopes warm in the unyielding cold.

“I want to die. Why won’t you let me die?” The question doesn’t seem posed at Graham, though Vesper looks at him for answers. Some greater power, perhaps Hydalaen, is expected to answer, but she never does.

Graham’s self suddenly speaks and his words make him wish he’d stayed silent. 

“I want to die too.” He says, or he doesn’t say, in a voice that isn’t his. The wind screams. The halls outside this room are full of nothing but ghosts and culled spirits. “I thought I did, at least, until meeting you. Will this be how I end up if I kick the bucket?” Graham laughs, feels empty from it, the last of his energy spent. “I’ll do better than you. Now that I know all you know… I’ll do better.”

Graham is disgusted with himself, yet somehow Vesper laughs. He laughs and laughs until the tears won’t stop, and his smile seems broken. 

“You’d better.”

The years pass by faster than Graham can keep track of, and Vesper is there throughout it. Until finally, one day, this not-Graham finds the solution to the eternal ice age of the Source, and as the ice melts away so does Vesper. Imprinted upon a fading memory.

Graham finally wakes to water dripping down across his cheeks, and when he finally opens his eyes he sees Arenvald posed over him, hands trembling as they hold the sides of his face in a gentle caress. “Graham…” His voice is choked, pleading, and he begs for something Graham can never promise him. “Don’t do that again, please. Don’t leave like that again.”. 

He smiles instead and kisses him, hoping its enough. 

\---

Graham spends a lot of time and care building a song to Vesper, and by the end of it he has written an operatic symphony. Being unable to play it on his own, he hands it off to a conductor he knows well in Ishgard, who brings it back to the orchestra. While he’s invited to listen to them rehearse it, Graham declines. Though he usually isn’t one for egoism, he already knows it is perfect. Sure enough, when he comes to the show they host a month or so later, he finds it played to absolute perfection. The show takes two hours to complete, beginning with somber melodies detailing the beginning of the end, and finishes with a growing epic. The revitalization of hope. Again, Graham has to stress, he is not an egoist.

But when many in the audience are brought to tears and come to a standing ovation, he does feel a bit of something. A bit of Vesper himself perhaps, who he’d learned in his long sleep was one for praise and pride. Surely that was it. 

He rents an inn at Ishgard and pays for it with his own money despite Aymeric’s attempts to stop him. He doesn’t even get the chance to fall asleep before the memories come for him. In fact the transition is so seamless, he doesn’t actually realize he’s no longer among his own time until a stranger appears sat upon his windowsill, staring out to an unfamiliar landscape. A vast ocean, with trees sprout up from the deep, reaching towards a sparkling night sky. The clouds, imbued with unbalanced aether, build rapidly and bring with them storms that build and break faster than any person could predict. Water pours down in bursts and then.. Silence. If he squints he can see boats passing along the still waves, trying to reach some unknown place. 

Another Miqo’te. Too many Miqo’te. He can already tell they are a spirit, and they turn their head to smile at Graham with a great, beaming grin. T’odd he says, and greets him, and pours out his life without any hesitation, as though they had been friends for their whole lives. Graham supposes that could be true, as they are technically one in the same, but yet still he would think they were strangers.

Whoever this T’odd is, he loves to talk. Whoever Graham is, he loves to listen. He sees it before he feels it, the benefit of being an observer rather than a participant. It blooms between them, spirit and living body, two minds who should be the same but have grown different from one another. Rather than fight against it, they go willingly towards it, and fall helplessly in love.

They walk through the rebuilding efforts of society, where Graham learns he is a lancer. T’odd has many things to say about everything, whether it be fauna or flora or aether or even just the shining sun across Graham’s face. Their conversations feel recent, as though they were not several centuries in the past, and this gives him new benefits he’d never had before in his other visions. 

He learns his name is Iyrnblaet and that he is a Roegadyn. The Roegadyn part he could have guessed fairly early on just from how he towered over T’odd, having to take a seat anytime they wanted to look at one another. T’odd calls him Iryn for short and also because he struggles to pronounce unfamiliar “blaet.” Iyrn doesn’t mind, neither does Graham, and they spend many days talking about nothing. 

Iyrn does not seem to have any sense of care for other people’s opinions, and when they ask who he’s talking to he plainly states a ghost. No one believes him and he doesn’t care. They call him crazy and he doesn’t care. They leave him alone in the company of T’odd and nothing more, for the world had already lost enough lives, and it didn’t seem fair to think the Warrior of Light wouldn’t go crazy after such reckless destruction in the world.

T’odd is unlike any other hero before. He talks about his tragic tale without a hint of sadness, his eyes sparkling with pride despite his horrific failure. He details the loss of his friends with a strain to his voice, the loss of his home with some tears, but he smiles as he describes the great efforts they went through to stabilize the shard, to keep aether in check to protect everyone. Iryn and Graham both can feel the guilt, as one soul, when T’odd describes his plight, because the fault for his shards destruction lies in the hands of the Source. The great War of the Magi here ate up all aether, produced a drought unlike anything anyone could have imagined, and undoubtedly if the war had been stopped then perhaps T’odd would have had enough time to prevent the disaster of his world. Instead, however, the war ushered in calamity, and in the drought the Source saw the shard’s excess aether as salvation against destruction, absorbing it and collapsing it’s reality in one fell swoop.

Iyrn tells this to T’odd, speaking his heart before his face gave it away. Graham feels an odd pluck of pride in knowing that none of his iterations have been very good at lying. 

“It can’t be helped now, can it?” T’odd says it so simply, so relaxed to the churn of fate. 

“But… if I had worked harder on my end, you would be... “ Graham feels the break, a shatter in his heart, and he cries somewhere in the empty inn room back in Ishgard, just as Iyrn cries in this memory. “T’odd, why are you hiding your pain from me?”

The hairline cracks had been there, but it took that one solid blow to turn them into large fissures across their hearts. The whole room is full of tears and sobs. 

“There’s nothing that can be done. What is the point in being sad?”

“You’ve lost so much because of me-”

“You couldn’t have known!” 

“But if I’d tried…”

They embrace each other. Even though Graham looks down and it is technically also his arms that hold this apparition, he feels removed. This is not his memory to experience, but somehow he must still be part of it. When T’odd and Iyrn kiss one another, he finds himself looking away as best he can. He wonders, given they are all technically the same, what category of love this falls under. When they fall into bed with each other, participating in a one-sided carnal pleasure of flesh where one can barely participate, Graham forces himself into a void of his own thoughts. Why is he being shown these memories now? Could they not have come to him before his fight with Emet-Selch? He realizes there’s probably a reason for it, perhaps because he is now eight whole souls rather than seven, the tipping point for his unawakened consciousness.

Yet still, as his face turns fiery red even as only a haunted spirit amongst a painfully vivid memory, he thinks it foolish he’s here now. 

The dream-like trance continues on for only a short time after that moment, retelling the tale of the love shared between two people who were both equally Graham in some ways and yet also not at all. Iryn’s legacy changes under the wings of T’odd’s gift of knowledge. The Roegadyn was always regarded as a hero, even after the great flood that was his calamity, but his skill had only been seen in combat and never in books. Yet suddenly, without warning, it seemed the man learned everything about the world. They would never know he simply reiterated stories from the ghost who haunted and loved him.

Iryn and T’odd passed away together, one of old age and the other of relief, and the legacy of this Warrior of Light was one Graham recognized at least somewhat from history books and ballads. The insane hero, possessed with the knowledge of the Twelve. Suddenly the stories took on a different light to him.

He awoke in his inn room dizzy and love drunk. With his haze he was barely able to make out the familiar Ishgardian scenery, and he had an even harder time transcribing the memory to song. So much to talk about and he’d never been particularly good at romantic themes. He focused instead on T’odd’s unrelenting optimism, which he found a little easier to transcribe. Yet in the end, the song was almost too cheery, lacking the deeper weight of sadness that ran underneath the surface. The song only came together when it was played, never on paper, and could only ever truly be performed by Graham. When he played it, the crowd seemed roused and motivated, reminded of everything they’d done to be where they are, everything they might still need to do in the future. 

Even his own hand faltered as he played, his own reality painting itself underneath the sunny retellings of heroism and sacrifice. One day he will only be a memory to his future self, whoever that may be, and he couldn’t help but wonder what visions they would see of him. The retellings of his encounter with Ardbert? Would the dream start the day they met, having wandered to the Source as the Warrior of Darkness and attempted his own sacrifice to save his world? 

He plays T’odd’s song to every patron, whether it is requested or not, and has his story transcribed by Urianger. He refuses to let the man’s unending optimism for the future die within his memory. 

\----

He expects the next vision soon, so he waits for it, takes his steps cautiously in battles, unsure when he might suddenly be pulled into a realm of forgotten memories. He explains himself to his friends, never wanting to risk surprising them. Ardbert is hesitant about the news but there is little anyone can do about it. When the vision comes, he will be forced to accept it, however long it might take.

The Scions all take it with an ounce of solemnity, knowing full well what spirit of calamity will come to him next. They had all lived through it, in some way, within the events of the Source.

“Wouldn’t this apparition have come to you before…? Being that the fall of Dalamud…” Alphinaud’s voice fades, hesitant. The rest of the group seems to pause with him, taking in his words. 

“It could be that I no longer remember it, if it did already happen. And if it hasn’t happened, then…” Graham hesitates, is somehow panicked at the thought of being haunted by this apparition, even though he’d already lived through his time with Ardbert and survived with a happy ending for them both. He didn't know if this next ghost would be friendly or vengeful, blame him or themself. Optimistically they would blame no one, perhaps in some ways like T’odd, who covered his self-flagellation with belief that life would persist regardless of failure. Graham liked to think of that, liked to think of T’odd a lot, unsure if it was spurred by the memories of his past self or the love he’d found for him as a mere spectator. 

He was jostled from his thoughts by Thancred, who could always be counted on to cut tension when it became too much to put up with.

“Regardless, the Seventh Umbral Calamity happened many years back, which means either the ghost visited Graham at a time he can’t recall or has been here this whole time, without our knowledge.” He pauses, doing that thing he loves to do where he looks swiftly across the table of faces with a cool and collected air. “I personally believe the latter. There was little time between the calamity and Graham’s consciousness that such a tale could have been retold, not unless this ghost met with Graham within the stream of time he was transported upon.”

“Perhaps Louisoix’s interference had a larger impact than we believed… though I can’t think on how exactly.” Y’shtola had chosen to stand, having been seated all day scouring tomes with Urianger to assist with their most recent issues in Garlemald. “I find it overly optimistic to think he kept the shard from being absorbed into the Source, but perhaps he in some way changed the effects of the rejoining…”

“What would be thy reason for the change in our environment then, I wonder. The snow in Coerthas, the crystalline remnants of Mor Dhona... tis difficult to believe the world was naught shaped by some calamity and, in tandem, to such devastation, brought upon thine destruction of a shard. Even Emet-Selch did thus confirm the end of seven realms, brought unto the Source.” Urianger’s words bring a nod to Alisaie to his side, who speaks her own thoughts once she has composed them.

“I agree. While my grandfather’s sacrifice prevented some of the greater destruction to our realm, it can’t have possibly stopped something of that scale. Despite the mitigations, we cannot deny that Dalamud’s descent was a calamity, and it had to have been the destruction of some reality.” Graham takes in those words, finds they sit poorly like a bad meal on his stomach. If that were true, then…

“The ghost must either be here amongst us now, or trapped within the self same void Graham was transported along by Lousoix.” Krile is the last to speak, and her words encapsulate the conclusions reached around the table. “Neither are particularly settling thoughts.”

Graham is haunted well after the meeting, not by dream but by crushing reality. If what Krile said was true, than either a fragment of himself had been left abandoned amidst the flow of time or… He tried to discreetly peer about the hall he wandered down, expecting unfamiliar shapes or forms to appear from any dark corners surrounding him. All he found was solitude and silence, patronizing him until he stormed out into the rowdy bar room of The Roost. The innkeep greeted him as he passed by and Graham tried to be polite, but he was riled and upset by unresolved memories. He took himself to drink instead, going well beyond his limits and stumbling out as a complete mess hours later. He collapsed at some point against the trees of the Shroud, thankful he gave off such an intimidating aura that the squirrels and ladybugs no longer pestered him. He could only distantly recall how much trouble they gave him starting out, when he’d barely remembered how to shoot a bow. 

“Do you remember that too?” He shouts louder than necessary, startling doe off in the distant trees. The silent reply does not deter his intoxicated thoughts. “This pisses me off. I know full well where you are, I just hate it. You’re tied to me, so the thought you were left behind in that rift… ugh!” Graham curls his fingers around where a jug of liquor might be, but remembers somewhat that he’s out in the woods, nowhere near a bar. “... I know you’re here, watching me. Listening.” He thinks he might hear a person rustling through the leaves, but even his drunken mind can remember that a ghost would make no noise. A squirrel runs up instead, spots Graham and runs back as quick as it came. The bard merely sighs and stands up to his feet, stumbling his way back to the gates of Gridania. “Whatever you have to say to me, I wish you’d just say it.”

Graham walks beyond the gate and leaves a hulking, shadowy figure behind to watch him from the woods, silent without answer. 

The Scions expect their Warrior out of commission for several weeks in a mission to coax his memories forth, but are surprised when they find him at their meeting table well before anyone else, ready for the next escapade. His support turns out to be dearly needed, turning the tides of several battles. Soon days turn into months, and from there a year, as the battle against the Garleans turns tide to an optimistic victory. It snowballs without any further playing hands by the Scions, who soon find themselves searching for busy work with their main goals now on the path to resolution. 

Graham takes to more travel, having never really done a proper tour through Doma. What he thought might be relaxing turns out to be a nightmare through no one’s fault but the memories he carries. The longer he travels in such a peaceful state with no conflict, the more he feels afraid of what might happen. What tragedy is waiting around the next bend? What horrific catastrophe will be in the next village he visits? He plays his songs with a smile on his face, but by the time he reaches Kugane he collapses in his inn room and has a mental break. He locks his door and windows, waits a full two days for the inevitable destruction, and only when his body forces him to sleep and awake to the morning sunlight does he realize he truly is safe and sound. 

Yet the feeling haunts him, unfamiliar, and he finds no joy in playing music in such a state. He sends his apologies to the bars and patrons he planned to play for and cancels his tour, instead taking the time to heal a wound he didn’t realize he’d hidden for so long. Relaxing, it turns out, is very difficult, at least when you are the hero of an entire reality. 

He spends night after night working through his conflict, staying within Kugane and taking full advantage of the bath house to soothe muscles he never noticed had gotten tense. Fairly soon he finds himself writing music, or at least attempting to string together some form of sound, and it is then that the haunting apparition comes to him. A massive Roegadyn large enough to take up the full window that let in the moonlight outside. Graham stops everything he’s doing, dropping his pen to the side. The man’s body size is matched only by his impressive aura, which demands Graham’s full attention.

When they lock eyes it feels like being chained down, an intensity burning holes through what little progress Graham had made on improving his psyche. 

“Creatures rose from oceans to puddles, volcanos to hearths, great oaks to moss, and storms to breezes.” His voice should be quiet, but it carries loudly, echoing through every part of Graham’s body and rattling his teeth. He’s afraid. This ghost cannot harm him, not physically, but he is afraid. “They came from everything, the dirt beneath our feet… the clouds above our heads. The world teemed with life so thickly, it suffocated in it. They clawed for life amongst each other, they drowned within one another, and their blood filled every crevice of our world. They were not hostile, nor dangerous, except in their sheer volume.”

Graham thinks back to his frustrations with his past selves, how they never said the right things at the right times. He forgives them now.

“It was a cruel joke to play. Our world had been dying out not days before this all happened, aether run dry by the greed of a single primal which ate away at everything in our shard.”

He knows what this Roegadyn is going to say before he says it, and he closes his eyes as though he thinks that can make him escape it. 

“I killed that primal to save my home. I was promised that would make it right again.”

“Why are you telling me this now?”

“You told me to.” Graham doesn’t remember this, he’d been black out drunk and hungover the next day. He accepts it though, accepts that this ghost might have a better memory of his life than he does, having nothing better to do than to watch it.

“I don’t care if you write a song about me, but I will tell you. You deserve to know. Not as punishment or reward. I don’t care if you are the hero or the villain of this ongoing story, but what I have to say… it is deserved.” He pauses, looks out the window to the rowdy voices below in the street. “Because it is the truth.”

Graham nods and accepts this, though regardless if he had, Hun would have still continued.

“The primal flooded the world with aether, and with it so many new things were created. Too many things. All at once, reality bounced back from one end of the brink and into the next. Where once we faded from existence, now we trampled it to death. Food ran short, the land once left with no life in it now suddenly overrun. The area where the primal died was left the worst and served as an example of what was to come. Starvation turned to cannibalism. Strife turned to war. Too loud, too much to handle. Just as quickly as everything came into existence, it began to die, and it was excruciating. Everything suffered. There was no painless, quiet void to greet our deaths. I was dragged, inch by inch, from suffering life to suffering death, forced to watch disaster take what I’d tried to save.” 

Graham is trembling, thinking of how easy it was to live as a spectator to so many memories he thought once were his. Now, in his own, he can’t help but feel much weaker than those before him. He followed in large footsteps and struggled to fill them.

“When I awoke from the void as nothing more than a shade, I thought to speak with you immediately, but you were just as glassy eyed and confused as I was. I lived through your memories, the recollection of the calamity you lived through. I’ve met your friends, I’ve bonded with them. I’ve travelled besides you to all the places you’ve been, seen your battles, your loses, your struggles. I yelled at you when I saw you near to giving up, I cheered for you when you moved forward. Even now, I’ve been watching you, watching whatever it is you’re doing here.” He motions to the mess of the room, in desperate need of tidying. Graham had been so focused on making a space for creativity that he hadn’t considered livability. “I don’t understand it. I don’t understand you. Sometimes I sense something similar to us, like there should be. Some semblance of heroism… but the next it feels like you’re so much farther away, like we still exist on separate shards, unaware of each other’s existence.”

Graham doesn’t know what to say to this. He feels the same but has no words for it, not in the same way this ghostly semblance of himself does. He can only think to say the most simple questions from his mind.

“Who are you?”

This takes his guest by surprise and, to Graham’s own shock, sends him into fits of sad-toned laughter.

“Is that so important anymore? I’m no one.” He pauses again, considering something as he looks over Graham’s disheveled appearance sprawled across the floor. “My name shouldn’t be remembered.”

“But what if I want to remember it?” It is a childish response, but he won’t let go of it. He will write this story regardless what himself from another time might believe.

“... then remember Hun Chakala. The fool who destroyed his world and ushered destruction to yours.” 

“The man who tried his best to perform the impossible and save all of reality.”

Hun looks away, out to the night sky, but Graham doesn’t miss the way the man’s face twists in pain for that brief moment before it’s hidden away. 

“A fool’s retelling.”

Graham spends the next few days writing music, which proves to be quite daunting as his ghostly companion still remains, keeping to his own business by reading tomes. He’s unable to turn the pages in his current state, so every few minutes Graham reaches out and turns it for him, thankful for his houseguest’s slow reading speed. Were this Urianger, his arm would already be sore.

He comes to an enjoyable rough draft of his new song, which he plays and tweaks for several more days before a letter arrives to him by Moogle, requesting his return to Mor Dhona. He loses track of time then, helping the Scions, conversing with Hun when the man craved companionship. He returns to the song a year or so later, finding it unremarkable and starting over entirely. The next one will perfectly entail the story he means to tell.

He spends many years with Hun, fussing over a single song. The remnants of his old works are discovered by an older Alphinaud, who, unbeknownst to Graham, shares them with the world. Fairly soon there are endless songs of Hun’s story travelling out in the world, none of which Graham is particularly fond of. Some are big hits for inns and bars, and on occasion while he works he might even hear a few familiar notes trail into his window before he slams the shutters closed and goes deeper into the quiet recesses of his home. 

Hun watches, silent most times, no comment to the living man’s obsession.

It is only when Graham’s ink runs dry one day that he finally finds himself free of his possession, screaming out of frustration and ripping apart messy parchment paper into tiny shreds.

“I don’t understand. The others came so easily… nothing is good enough!”

“It is because you’re lying.” Hun’s words come easily, having had ages to think on the issue while Graham conveniently ignored the world. “You are writing me as a hero. Of course it will never sound right.”

“NO!” Graham loses his temper for a moment and simmers back down, startling even himself in his sudden change of mood. “No. That isn’t true… you were the hero. You were always the hero, even if the end didn’t seem like such. You deserve something good. I can give that to you.”

Hun smiles, watches Graham shift around the room in a desperate act to find more ink, more paper, more inspiration for a suitable song to tell a tale he wants to rewrite. 

He doesn’t find any of it. It had all been used up, long ago, and left him with nothing but an empty house to show for it. 

“Maybe you’re looking in the wrong place.” Hun reaches out towards the window, an action Graham instinctively follows up on by opening up the shutters for him, a very delayed limb. The sunlight shines brightly through the leaves of the Shroud, a green glow bringing life to everything around it. Hun closes his eyes as though he can feel the warmth of it. Graham walks up behind him, trying to see what Hun sees. Something he isn’t able to comprehend. “I came into this world a broken hero. I never saved what I hoped to. I never felt the success of knowing I protected what I loved. I died a failure. When we met Ardbert, I’d never met a man so similar to myself. I’d been with you this whole time, seen what a real hero could be - I had never met another one who’d failed as I had. I wish I could have spoken with him… I think we would have had a lot to say. Or maybe we wouldn’t have had to say anything at all.”

Graham doesn’t know what it means. He so tired suddenly, overwhelmed by all the time he’s wasted writing stories that never tell what he hopes they will, never changes an ending that’s long since been set in stone.

“But I realized, after that… I was a hero. I had the pride to know I was the hero all along, and I even got to see my own story unfold. I just didn’t get the name right.” Hun smiles, so peaceful, and it is in that moment that everything suddenly reveals itself to Graham and the tears begin to come. He tries to stop them but they are unrelenting, just as the truth is for the story playing out before. “Thank you for all the memories, Graham Harper. I feel happy, knowing I could be a part of our story and its happy ending.”

“Hun.” The name is choked by his own traitorous throat. He desperately reaches out, praying to whatever god will allow his hands grip around the Roegadyn’s arms, but in his grip is nothing but the windowsill. The apparition is gone after so many long years together, left behind by nothing but a thousand songs, none of them ever quite enough to tell the story Graham had etched inside his heart.

Yet, just like all the other memories, inspiration strikes him, even in that great depressive sadness. He had no more ink to write with and so he takes a simple dagger to his hand and dips his pen to the blood that spills, his stubbornness to commit Hun’s legacy matched only by his creative prowess. 

He writes a story Hun would be proud of, which takes a mere two hours to finish, and by the end of it he is shaking from blood loss and somewhat delirious. He could try to play this now, but the notes would come unstable in his current state, and he couldn’t wait for himself to rest and heal to see it brought to life by song. So he sent it off by mail, to some bards he’s heard of but who he barely knows, who’d drink up the words and notes and spread it away to the ends of the world. He falls asleep, finally able to rest after being haunted by endless turmoil, listening to his own song play on in his dreams. 

The Ballad for the Warrior of Light.


End file.
